


Tap Out

by theshadowswhisper



Category: South Park
Genre: Action, F/M, Feminism, POV Second Person, Philosophy, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:21:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3234392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theshadowswhisper/pseuds/theshadowswhisper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scott looks half-dead already, sitting under the pale wash of the emergency room halogen lights.  He’s so pale and sickly—an agoraphobic condition, probably, based on his current levels of anxiety.  It further begs the question as to why Eric’s peril is so compelling as to inspire Scott’s presence here despite a clear dislike of being outside of his own home. </p><p>Your undeniable fascination is probably the last thing he wants to deal with, but for the first time in months, you feel yourself genuinely curious.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tap Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kankri](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kankri/gifts).



> Yet again, a bit of weirdness born out of RP with Max. I love this oddball couple more than I can say, and I really hope someday, I'll finish this story up. Thanks for bearing with me! I know I dump a lot of partial projects on here. It's partly as a promise to myself that I will finish them at some point. 
> 
> Scott is based on Max's headcanons, and Wendy, of course, is all me. Peace, my friends.

You try not to think too much, you really do. You stare at the face in the mirror and try to reconcile your parts—sinew and skin and brain and thought, perpetually disconnected realities, though one informs the other or the other way around. 

It’s easy to get tangled up in things like that. You know that it’s important to fight your way out of your own head. You wind a thick, periwinkle scarf around your neck twice, and it’s soft as the feeling in your chest, which doesn’t touch the sharp thoughts in your head, or the cold numbness at the tips of your fingers. It’s time to look away from the mirror, and try to muddle through a little while longer. But sometimes life is like grasping onto a chord in both hands and realizing it’s not tied to anything. Better not put your weight on it. Better not test it. Better just cling, and flex every muscle, and hope that’s enough to hold you up ‘til something forces you to test your faith.

It’s snowing outside, and you remember that you are an atheist and the only god you believe in is the hand of time, pushing you along, boots skidding on the pavement. Your reflection has a revelation (maybe), but you turn away instead of asking her what it is. You don’t have time to unmake yourself today. 

You just barely have time to catch the bus.

[ ]  
You don’t remember the last time you weren’t bored in a classroom. When you were ten years old, you slept with a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra under your pillow, and you prayed for people to overcome superstition, but the same time wished there were someone big enough to pluck you out of your life and put you somewhere people thought it was important to love philosophy as a practice and philanthropy as a faith-act that had nothing to do with religion. You’ve always wished you were somewhere else, and clung to your books like they’d teach you how to get out, and turn the page away from South Park finally so you could read something goddamn else.

That’s why you sit in the front row, and people think that’s all there is to you (That’s Wendy Testaburger, and she cares about the things we’re supposed to, better than we do). It’s fine, better, that they see your pleated skirts and pink beret and tell themselves stories about someone who does not exist. She takes your place, and you’re grateful because the person you really are keeps secrets.

Your secrets maybe caused all this disconnect, you think. You took yourself out of this life in spirit, and so the body that fills your shoes does not feel like your own. You’ve exorcised yourself out of South Park. 

Gregory’s text (you know it’s his, because it’s an anonymous number) tells you it’s time to step out of your mind again. 

We’re coming. Be ready.

You always are.

[ ]  
Running, because people are shooting at you, again, and your feet are used to pounding the earth underneath you like that’d put the urgency back into your veins. It doesn’t, but it’s good to look alive, and act alive, even when you’re a string of conditional logic chaining and reversibly read, and there’s no heart in that. 

You always believe in only the most literal anyway. You have a heart. It’s pumping very loudly at the moment, because your body knows it is being hunted. Your fingers itch around the grip of your pistol, and sometimes you think that your firearm is your best friend. You can pull fire out of the air by pulling a trigger, and so few inanimate things react with a kick like they are coming to life. It’s a miracle, and sometimes you let the slide bite your thumb so you can interact with the thing you trust the most: the power to forcefully penetrate the soul. Your gun can do that. You can do that, with your gun.

You duck a fence, climb a different fence. Sweat beads on your face, and you hit the ground with a thud when you jump down from the other side. You know you’ll outrun your pursuer, because you put in the work, and he only did what he had to. Settling is dying, it’s just slower. People don’t understand that, in your experience, and you have no problem using that against them.

Extra credit’s not as optional as people like to think. You know that the sum total of what counts is often tallied by excess alone. But few people think about counting the way you do. You need more than they do but that’s not desperation. It’s not. You’re not desperate, because nameless desperation is just a longer way to say you’re hungry for something. You’ve taught yourself to need nothing, and that’s just the opposite.

Oh, yes—people have souls. You know this, because yours is going to sleep. You can feel it drifting off and becoming fuzzy antimatter at the bottom of your chest. It stirs when the man hunting you clicks open the barrel of his handgun and spins the chamber. Even from your perch in the tree just few meters above him, you know from the look on his face that he’s out of ammo.

“P-please, miss,” the man puts his hands up in the air and stares at you with wide eyes when you turn on him. You are no longer hunted. 

You smile, and you feel this thing in your chest clench and loosen up, like a hand in the dirt when the heart gives out.

[ ]  
You remember when you had something like a religion. It’s a point of pressure in your life. People are always eager to see each other on their knees. You wonder if it’s a symptom of needing to worship together or the need to have matching bruises. You don’t care either way, ultimately because people have to earn your bruises. The pressure won’t make you buckle. It’s only going to teach you resistance in every language. (Yes, Gregory, even French, though you’ve long stopped wanting to hear ballads about the glory of resisting. Glory sounds like the songs your parents used to make you sing in church).

Bebe knew how to coax you into giving away a few bruises, though. She taught you that crushing general pressure’s got nothing on the quiet tactical knowledge of pressure points. It is the science of pushing in the weak bits and avoiding the strong, so you never accidentally make someone stronger. The secret of combat is neutralizing threats, turning them into nothing—struggle creates stronger opponents. It takes tact to reduce them to nothing.

You struggle to keep struggling, and then you will never be weak. Your pressure points will become calluses if you can find people to tussle with who don’t know how to exploit them. If you can survive what should by all rights kill you.

Now she sits on your bedroom floor, and you remember when you thought everything you ever needed could be clutched in a handful of gold. You though if you could bury two hands in those soft, gold corkscrews you’d come out with a richer life, full of things you could cup in your palms like precious jewels, and the whole world could feel like that. Like it was precious, and you needed to clutch at handfuls of it. You could spend a lifetime clutching (because there was so much, and it was important enough to keep), and she used to make your heart feel like it was trying the catch the beats.

You briefly understood why poetry is built of tiny, specific details, like lips— an uneven cupid’s bow over a perpetual pout, the empty curve of her hip, the quicksilver slide of her eyes, right over you and not through you, as it turns out.

But you never liked poetry, despite being named after poet—and you like fiction even less, though you chose a name invented for a fictional character (who never wanted to grow up and loved stories) for you alias. You learned that a hollow, thin love will soon starve to death, and that poets can live on metaphors because they can make them beautiful and fall in love with their lovely suffering. They learn ecstacy in decay, and fall on their knees like everyone else.

But you’re not built to worship something beautiful. Your knees only bend to tie your bootlaces tighter. And you need to get your hands on things in the literal way, and you know by now that that’s how you kill metaphors and the intangible.

So unrequited love made you weak, and you cut it out like a tumor. Lipstick’d bruises on your neck turned brown at the edges and then faded away entirely, and you never let her re-imprint you. You euthanized your starving love instead of feeding it any poetry.

Now, she smiles up at you, nails clacking against her phone as she texts Clyde (doubtlessly something about a party you’ll attend for appearances, and she’ll attend to take note of others’ appearances). You still get a hollow ache from where the thing in your chest used to clench at that smile, but it doesn’t hurt anymore. You got rid of the kneejerk reaction you used to have to her by carving out pieces of your muscle and sinew. There’s a phantom pain in a part you no longer own, but you can think that away. You can think almost anything away. 

“You coming tonight, Wendy?”

“For a little while, I promise.”

[ ]

The light from the trashcan fire licks the shadows of the partygoers, and you make small talk with a boy who has beer on his breath, and you think you remember him from chemistry class. Neither of you say anything interesting, and you suppose that’s the art of small talk. Nobody says anything interesting, so you can focus on being interested in each other instead.

But you are not interested. You are biding time and building an alter ego you can escape into when you need to lay low. You tell yourself this, to make the small talk feel more important. It doesn’t work, not directly, but it makes you feel less like screaming at how useless it is to live a small existence in a small town. 

Eric Cartman does not share this sentiment. He seems to take pride in being as small minded as possible. Ironically, he does this by running his big, bigoted mouth and making his presence feel as large as he can. You watch him out of the corner of your eye, wary though you don’t like to admit he makes you so. His dark eyes glint in the orange light of the fire. He stands in a small group of people—Kenny McCormick among them, and Clyde. Your classmates are in high spirits, sprinkling root killer into the fire to make the flames flicker green. Eric’s voice carries over the rest, loud and boisterous, demanding listeners as always.

“Heh heh. You guys. Did you know? 9 out of 10 people enjoy gang rape.”

Your eyebrows dig down, and you try not to be bothered. You’ve always been a victims’ advocate. Protecting the weak makes you feel strong. It’s a substitution for real strength, you know, which comes from within and not without, but as always, you default to literal instead of spiritual. And this—helping people—you can measure. Inner strength can’t be measured without a mechanism, but you stopped caring about anything but the numbers a long time ago. But there are people, you have discovered, who genuinely need protection. 

You do your best. But you will never stop every rapist in the world. You will never fix the victims of trauma passed. And it makes you angry, because it reminds you that there are things you cannot do. 

“You guys heard about that girl in Denver who’s suing her boyfriend for rape, right?” He continues on, and you try not to hear it. But it feels like the words are determined to reach you, drilling into your ears and insisting you engage the question. It’s not worth it; it never is with Eric. You try to remember this, and feel so irritated that you have to have this argument with yourself again. 

You are above his pettiness. You are not even here.

He talks like he knows you’re trying not the hear him.

“Just another drunk bitch crying rape to cover her own bad decisions,” he decides, patting his own chest as if accrediting himself some sort of authority. “If you ask me, the only reason people care so much about rape these days and treat it like it’s so bad is that feminists bitch about it so much.”

“Well, no one asked you!” you snap, because you can’t help it. People are listening to this garbage, and you cannot stand idly by while Eric spins the ugly truth to look like something tame and domesticated. You will not allow him to fool people into letting monsters into their homes. “So shut your mouth before I shut it for you!”

He looks at you—smug, because you’re looking, and that is what he wanted, and you hate him for it. You’ve already lost the first round, but now you’ve got your fists balled up, and you’ll make him pay for it.

“Oho,” Eric crosses his arm. “Don’t like that, do you, you hippie skank?”

You jerk away, facing in a direction away from him. He’s goading you now, gloating over having captured your attention in the first place. You should’ve kept your mouth shut. You’ve given him fuel, and Eric’s always been very efficient with encouragement. The slightest amount is often enough to keep him going and going.

“Whatever, Eric.” You force your voice to stay cool.

It doesn’t stay cool for long.

Within twenty minutes, you are rolling in the dust, and within ten seconds of that, he cowers and begs you to stop pounding him with your fists and feet and rage.

Only when he makes a particular shriek, as you slam him sideways into the ground amid the cheers of his friends (not allies), do you hear the crack of bone. And you know you have gone too far when he does not beg you anymore.

[ ]

You nurse bruised knuckles and sit in the waiting room of a hospital. Liane Cartman sits on the opposite side, and she is distraught, but oddly enough, doesn’t seem too angry with you. More than anything, Liane just seems tired. You guess eventually, Eric tires everyone out. His ceaseless desire for suffering produces a secondhand sort of misery for his love ones. It’s hardly a wonder no one really keeps up with him.

Except, apparently, that one person does. He rushes into the emergency room, wild-eyed and frantic, and when he demands the reception tell him the status of Eric Cartman, you nearly fall out of your chair.

Because this is the last person in the world who should care about whether Eric Cartman’s broken clavicle ruptured a blood vessel or did nerve damage, except to maybe worry that it didn’t actually do the job and he’d have to finish it off himself.

But there’s no malice or spite in his voice when he insists to be let in to see Eric. “I’m family,” he says, and doesn’t even bother to sound ironic or bitter about it. “You have to let me in. I’m his brother.”

You stare unabashedly then. Scott Tenorman looks so distraught that for all the world, you’d be convinced he is genuinely worried. Except that that is impossible, because everyone in South Park knows why Scott’s apparent concern for Eric’s well-being is not something that is easily explainable.

They tell him that Eric isn’t seeing any visitors until they stabilize him, and it’s only then that he turns his attention to you.

“Are you Wendy Testaburger?”

He demands this of you, eyes flashing with something pretty unmistakable as anger. You don’t react to that, because Scott’s bigger than you, not scarier. You take in the dark circles under his eyes, malnourished body and narrow shoulders, poor posture, unstable crack of his voice. You could drop him in seconds if he attacked you. There’s no real threat here.

But there is a pretty fucking interesting question, and it’s not whether you are or aren’t Wendy Testaburger.

You watch Scott carefully as you answer. “Yes. Why?”

He lunges, grabs you by the front of your jacket. Shakes you. “If he doesn’t come out of this, I will put you in the fucking ground! I don’t care WHAT he said! He was probably just JOKING to get a response out of you! Christ, you can do some serious nerve damage when you snap someone’s collarbone! You could’ve killed him over some stupid shit he did for attention!”

You scowl at him, and carefully, deliberately pick his fingers off of your coat.

“One, I don’t have to justify myself to you of all people, Scott.” You say it warningly, plucking up his hand and removing it entirely from your lapels now. “Two, trust me when I say I wouldn’t have killed him with witnesses around. And three?”

You smile, sweetly. Tightly. The last point is the most important. You fucking hate it when people (especially strangers) do this shit:

“Don’t ever fucking touch me again.”

Scott’s vicious glare doesn’t let up an inch. “Look,” he snarls down at you, “I am the last person in the world you will ever intimidate. I literally have nothing left to lose.” His eyes flash, the first true spark of life you’ve seen in those glazed depths so far. “You know what that means?”

You deliberately cross your ankles, boots kicked over each other under your chair. You lean back in your chair. “Enlighten me.”

“It means,” Scott leans in close, “That I’m bored. Fuck with Eric again, and I will make a career out of making your life a living hell. I’ve got nothing but time, so whatever. Your move.”

You just raise both brows at him. He’s very obviously not joking. And while you’re not super concerned with his threats, because you’ve dealt with bigger and smarter and scarier just this morning, you are intrigued. 

The human map of emotions never ceases to amaze you with its unprecedented twists. Scott’s weird protectiveness over Eric is a true puzzle, and it makes your fingers twitch with longing. You need to untwist this weird reality and make some sense of it.

“Okay,” you agree easily. “I won’t fuck with him.” You hold up a finger. “If,” you smile now, “You’ll answer just one question for me, honestly.”

Scott’s thin lips set into a stiff, defensive little line. “…What do you wanna know?”

“Why do you care?” You hunch forward a little bit, with interest. 

“I’m done with this. I stand by what I say, and I don’t have to answer your question. Stay away from Eric. You don’t wanna find out what someone with nothing left is capable of.” Then, Scott flinches away from you and retreats without answering. He sits on the opposite side of the waiting room, hauling his knees up under himself and rocking back and forth anxiously. His mouth moves, and he appears to mutter something under his breath—chanting? You watch him for a while, and keep an eye on him peripherally for a long time after that.

But if Scott thinks you’ll let up that easily, you think, he’s in for a surprise. He may think he does not have anything to lose, but you know better.

Everyone has something. And you’re pretty sure Scott’s something—for one reason or another—is currently in the ICU, because you put him there.

Scott looks half-dead already, sitting under the pale wash of the emergency room halogen lights. He’s so pale and sickly—an agoraphobic condition, probably, based on his current levels of anxiety. It further begs the question as to why Eric’s peril is so compelling as to inspire Scott’s presence here despite a clear dislike of being outside of his own home. 

Your undeniable fascination is probably the last thing he wants to deal with, but for the first time in months, you feel yourself genuinely curious.

So he’s going to have to deal with it.


End file.
